Last night many Houston trivia players attended an Irish wake for Connelly Wirth. A lot of us hadn't played trivia together or interacted other than through Facebook in years, so despite the sad occasion, we had a great time seeing each other. Stories were told and many "Conn Specials" (a Lone Star beer with a shot of Jameson) were drunk. It was definitely a party Conn would have loved.
I met Conn when he was a player at Catbirds in the early 200s; he later became a bartender there, and eventually made the migration to Mezzanine, where he was part of the team that won Smartest Bar two years in a row. In addition to trivia (both NTN/BT and live pub games), Conn loved music; he was always posting lyrics on his FB page for us to identify and complete. His second handle MARLEY was in honor of Bob Marley, whose songs he would do in karaoke. We shared an interest in the music of Canadian folk singer Stan Rogers, and also in Celtic songs, and because we both had ties to Illinois, we were fellow Cubs fans.
I hadn't seen him in person for a while, but we interacted regularly on Facebook, and although I know he was upset about the election, I didn't sense anything beyond what his other friends and I were going through. It was therefore a shock to learn a couple of weeks after the fact that on Thanksgiving day, at the age of 51, Conn walked out of his house leaving everything including his wallet and cell phone behind. He was declared a missing person, and a formal search was begun. At first I hoped that perhaps he just decided to make himself a totally new life, per these lyrics from Stan Rogers' "Northwest Passage":
How then am I so different From the first men through this way? Like them, I left a settled life I threw it all away.
But his body was eventually discovered and identified, and "threw it all away" took on a much sadder meaning.
We are still trying to understand why someone with so many friends and family, and so much passion for things in life, could voluntarily take leave of all of it. I hope wherever Conn is now, he has finally found his own Northwest Passage, but we wish he'd just stayed with us.
Brooke/AARDVK/KRIEM/LGLPRO/SFPRO
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